Category Archives: Fantasy

The studio has undertaken a commission to paint up three of the Lieutenants from Descent, Journeys In The Dark. This is a questing game or a”dungeon crawling” game that I have yet to play, but looks very similar to a game that I used to play in the ’90s called Warhammer Quest.

I had some downtime last evening, where I thought it would be great to simply clean up the models ready for the start date of the commission for the client, which isn’t for a while yet. The models I received were three Lieutenants: Belthir, Bol’Goreth, and lastly Valyndra, the Wyrm Queen.

Valyndra is the model that I want to specifically talk about today.

I find the cleaning up of models, really satisfying, but it can be tedious. There is nothing more unsightly than a model that has has a lot of time being painted with mould lines showing. I really felt that as I was developing my abilities as a painter many years ago, even if I couldnt get an ‘Eavy Metal studio paint job on my models, if I could clean the miniature up well, then it helped the aesthetics of the model immensely. I really like to go to town and clean as much off as I can and well sometimes you just can get all, without damaging the model, but I really attempt to have the light shine on the model, to help with finding as much of the mould lines as I can.

After cracking open the blister packaging that the model comes in, I took stock of what I had in front of me:

With this being my very first Descent experience, I immediately found that the model was sculpted in a very beautiful manner. I could tell that there was a major difference in the time required to assemble a Descent model, compared to that of Games Workshop (you could easily spend hours assembling a few models from GW, but that is half the fun). Now dont get me wrong, I understand that the miniatures serve two different markets of gamers. Wargaers who play Warhammer Fantasy or 40k, are modellers and painters as well as gamers and as such command a different level of interaction with the assembly of their models. They like to be able to have multiple parts, so that they can easily convert up models so that one, say, High Elf Lord on a Dragon is different from somebody elses. Whereas gamers who play games with miniatures such as Descent, or Relic, or even Mansions of Madness are primarily board gamers and as such they are a demographic that just want to open the box, setup the game and go for it.

I found that there was a really fine mould line on Valyndra, so immediately I got out my set of files and hobby knife and began to clean up the plastic. The plastic was just shearing off from the edge of the model, making it a really effortless task. I did notice one significant quality to the plastic, of which I will get into in a moment. The mould line, being such a fine line here, was at times a little hard to detect. That actually is a good thing because someone who doesn’t want to do any prep work whatsoever (and for Descent, most don’t) can be assured that they have a high quality miniature that is professionally made. It was clear on certain parts of the body, that because the Wyrm has had the major assembly done prior to packaging, there were slight gaps or minor misalignments evident, but nothing that I couldn’t fix.

Now, as I was filing away I noticed that the plastic was an extremely soft, bendy plastic that I suppose lends itself well to board games miniatures. Its better that if a miniature is dropped, that it bend under the fall. I have noticed that all Fantasy Flight minis for their board games use this particular type of plastic. The main thing I was concerned with is just exactly what type of glue to use here. The two main glues that I have are super glue and polystyrene cement. Super glue is used for any metal miniatures and polystyrene cement is a glue that is used for plastics where you apply a small amount to each of the sides to be stuck together and wait a few seconds. What actually happens here is that it melts the plastic a little and then when you press the two pieces together, the pieces “melt” together and eventually set, resulting in something that is glued together.

I did a little research and found that the material used in production is actually a vinyl plastic, therefore super glue won’t do the trick. Poly cement won’t be as effective as if I were to be gluing GW plastics, so I had to investigate another product. It was something that I actually had already and was called The Last Glue and it is composed of something called Cyanoacrylate. It bonds when the two sides are deprived of oxygen, so if I were to get any on my fingers, everything would be ok, until I touch the two together (which I think is a normal reaction) and it is strong, really strong. I had recently run out, so an order was placed and should arrive in perfect time to glue together Valyndra.

I think my point here is I really like the plastic that FFG use for their miniature products in the preparation, now I just need to get the mini stuck together and painted. There will be many photos of the painting process, so keep on checking back in the future.

Today we have another addition to the Seismic Studio blog family. Seismic Miniature Painting Studio is pleased to announce an Empire Warrior Priest. One of my most favourite models in the warhammer fantasy range ever released, sometimes the model doesn’t need to be big and imposing, with multiple components; a simple model can inspire us to great painting jobs. this miniature just got his final few brush strokes mere hours ago.

This magnificent sculpt is such a characterful model. The anger in his face tells us such a storied history and it seems like he has been wronged in his past. Armed to the teeth with two warhammers, he’s ready to take on all his demons.

I decided to paint his heavy plate armour and also the two warhammers with NMM techniques and this brings out the amazing sculpt. There are some more photos to check out.

Weapons at the ready.

I decided to enhance this awe inspiring model with some Non Metallic Metal techniques on the plate armour and the dual warhammers

Nice shot from the back.

In addition, take a look at the current ebay auction for this new model:

So I felt it was time to work on my non metallic metal (N.M.M.) technique, not just painting N.M.M. silver, but gold too. I looked at a few models that have displayed the technique and decided it was something I can definitely pull off. In research for a step-by-step technique, I would like to source http://warhammer-empire.com/theforum/?topic=10116.0 A great resource for painting NMM. It is a style that I have had many friends ask me to do in the past and I gave it an attempt with my Imperial Fist Lysander and also my Eldar wraithlord and they turned out well to a certain extent; both of these models have picked up painting awards in the past.

Captain Darnath Lysander rises up over a rock, at the ready for battle.

Capt. Lysander

Wraithlord which picked up a silver demon trophy.

Wraithlord; note the attempt at NMM. Although I had given NMM a shot on Lysander, this was my first big model with the technique done over the whole model.

This model has had extensive conversions and sculpting involved.

I felt that I needed to get back to basics with the technique, since doing yellow NMM takes a lot more than I suspected and I realise now that there’s a fine line between painting NMM gold and simply bright yellow.

I found that I had a dwarven Demon Slayer model that is really quite old now. It is one of my favourite models and I have to say that I have always had a soft spot for dwarves. The contrast that you can achieve with the flesh tones and wacky colour hair is really attractive to me and then there is the ability to do some freehand facial tattoos on some of the more rare units, I wanted to keep this model’s flesh clear of tattoos. They are a slow army in the game, so there was my hesitation; they could do with a little speed.

When I was painting the model, I painted about 95% of the model, not including the areas that required NMM, then moved into the NMM. Tackling one area of NMM silver first, I just practiced where I felt that the light was going to hit it, with sharp contrasts with areas that had little or no light. It didn’t look especially effective. This was a small mistake, but could be easily corrected. I quickly realised that in order for the technique to look correct, I needed to paint all the areas that required the NMM, as the key its to “trick” the eye into seeing the paint look reflective, when it in fact, is just the contrasts between all the different tones. It is not unlike regular painting, where some kind of visual trickery is used.

Dwarf Demon Slayer. This was a first attempt of doing NMM with a painting guide, from someone who knows quite a bit about painting in that style

Demon Slayer from the back. I soon realised that this technique was all about using the “light” to create shadow where there may not be.

Bringing all the NMM together was the final work on the gold NMM. I found this to be a little harder to pull off, since I was using more than three paints (silver NMM actually uses Codex Grey, Skull White and Chaos Black). Gold NMM uses a combination of yellows, browns and finally, a very small amount of Chaos Black, which was my added twist to the great NMM painting guide. Another difference between NMM gold and silver,that I learned from the NMM guide mentioned above, is the lack of use of pure white highlight when painting gold. Many other sites did use a final touch of white to reflect the light, but this really detracted from the overall effect of gold NMM (thanks Quadrille).